The dry words of a press release issued by police don’t tell the story.
“A second female juvenile called 911 to report a domestic dispute at 9:58 p.m. She escaped from the home…”
For Tanya Newman, one of three Riverhead Town Police public safety dispatchers on duty on the night of Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015, the rest of the story is still so vivid she can’t even talk about it without breaking down.
A 911 call came in from a young girl who had been chased out of her Wading River home by the man she’d just witnessed shoot her mother. The gun-wielding man, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, was chasing her, the hysterical girl told the dispatcher.
“I had to do everything I could to prevent her from going back in that house,” Newman recalled, “to get her to find a safe place to hide.”
At that point, neither Newman nor the terrified girl knew that the gunman had gone back inside the house, where he killed the girl’s older sister before turning the gun on himself.
Even as she worked to talk the 14-year-old girl out of going back into the house, she knew police officers and EMS had to be dispatched to the scene.
The two other dispatchers on duty that night knew as soon as they heard the tone of Newman’s voice that something horrible was unfolding. Newman and fellow PSDs Debbie Buyukdeniz and John Seus are a team. They know each other’s voices. They know when something extraordinary is going down. And when they heard Newman on the phone that night, they instantly knew something horrific was happening. “They were right next to me,” Newman recalls.
Buyukdeniz and Seus helped dispatch police officers and EMS, while Newman concentrated on keeping the girl safe.
“I had to convince her to stay on the phone for those 10 and a half minutes till I could get those guys there,” Newman said. “She wanted to go back inside to make sure her mom was OK. I think she knew. It was horrible, just horrible. She’d lost her mom right in front of her eyes,” she said.
The girl ran out of the house with no shoes on. It was cold. her feet were freezing. I tried to talk her to a safe spot, a place where she could hide,” New man recalls.
“You always try to listen to what’s going on in the background. I didn’t hear him yelling or anything like that. I just kept her on the phone. I was not going to disconnect that phone until I knew one of her officers had her,” Newman said.
“When I talk to kids on the phone, I always give them my name,” Newman said. “For some reason, I didn’t do that with Brandy.” Brandy’s mother’s name was also Tanya. “Can you imagine if I did?”
That call stays with her and probably will for the rest of her life.
“Certain things stick with you, stay in your head,” said Newman, a 17-year veteran dispatcher. “You replay it in your head.
“But she’s here and that’s the most important thing.”
When police arrived on the scene that night, they found the gunman, Thomas Calhoun, 44, the girl’s mother and her sister, Tanya Lawrence, 43 and Danielle, age 17, shot dead inside the family’s 12th Street home. (See story.) Brandy Lawrence, 14, was not physically injured.
As soon as officers arrived and the 911 call was terminated, Newman said, “I broke down. I just couldn’t stop sobbing.”
Dispatchers, like police officers, never know what their work day will bring.
“You walk into that shift one way and you leave a different person,” Newman said.
“My life was changed that night.”
Nevertheless, Newman said, “I was just doing my job. I did what I was trained to do.”
Even as something as dramatic and life-altering is transpiring, the other calls keep coming in. Dispatchers can have a 14-year-old child on the line, who just witnessed her mother shot to death, and still need to field calls for car accidents, illnesses and noise complaints.
“All the other calls still come in,” Newman said. “We take every single call and we have to filter them and set priorities.”
“You have to be able to multi-task,” she said. “It can go from nothing to all-hell-breaks-loose— just like that.”
Newman, a Riverhead PSD for 16 years, lives in Southold with her husband Todd and their two children, ages 12 and nine.
She was honored last night by the Riverhead Police Benevolent Association at the organization’s annual installation dinner, held at the Suffolk Theater. (See separate story.)
Newman was overcome with emotion as she accepted the award.
“It all came flooding back,” she said afterward.
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